Education is a Kingdom Vehicle

Education is a major kingdom vehicle providing access into new areas of the social strata, impacting the social structure. By fusing Christ-centered values with vocations that God is calling people into we become more missionally engaged in shaping Ohio through businesses and non-profits. In effect, a larger kingdom footprint. The kingdom is, of course, not a place but a state of being. It’s a condition. The people of God have to see what the ramifications of the kingdom, being in and among the people of God, mean for the local church. If the kingdom comes through the sharing of relationships, and the local church is the hermeneutic of the gospel to its community, then the local church must be engaged in society. This is why the positions Richard Niebuhr’s crowning work Christ and Culture have of “Christ above culture” and “Christ the transformer of culture” are the most reasonable frameworks of discerning how the people of God should approach the kingdom and greater society.

The fact is that Christ did not first establish the church and add the Spirit secondly. As Jesus was conceived by the Spirit in Mary and empowered for mission in baptism, so the church is birthed in a baptism of water and fire. The Spirit is the womb of the church on the Day of Pentecost.

Now the church exists for the world, not for itself, by participating in the apostleship of Christ by the power of the Spirit. More than churches full of people, God wants (and the world needs) people full of the Spirit. And the church is empowered for its mission by the Spirit, there is the great longing, great groaning. We are all witnesses of these things. In the Spirit we can envision a new future and we protest the world order as it is.

The University becomes the expression of the church for the priesthood of all believers and cast with Christ at the center is a true University, not a multiversity, because the centripetal force of all study being “en Christo”, with the purpose of creating scholar-saints

The kingdom is, of course, not a place but a state of being. It’s a condition.